While numbers decline at churches throughout the country, Religious Education (RE) has been thriving in schools throughout Reading.

At any one time around 10,000 schoolchildren in East Reading, Earley, Woodley and Caversham are taking part in a modern way of learning about the Christian church called REinspired.

And the message from teachers of the new form of RE is that children are loving it. Some are even dressing up to act out weddings, baptisms and Bible scenes and there is art and craft work. At one school a teacher’s fiancé proposed to her in class so that children could witness a genuine marriage proposal while visits to churches feature regularly.

Linda Galpin who runs REinspired in Woodley, said: “They love it. They see you coming in at lunchtime and when they catch sight of you it’s, ‘Yes, it’s RE this afternoon’. Ten years ago there would not be the same response. There is drama, craft and we try to make it as interactive and creative as possible. Hopefully they will enjoy it and learn from it. That’s not always easy for teachers.”

Ironically REinspired grew out of Ofsted’s concerns for the teaching of RE at one of Reading’s more multi-cultural schools, Alfred Sutton primary in the late 1990s.

The school asked nearby Anderson Baptist Church and Park United Reformed Church to help and eventually more schools and churches got involved.

The project became known as the Churches Together in Earley and East Reading Schools Work Project but was reborn as REinspired in 2005 and is now reaching 4,200 schoolchildren in Earley, a similar number in Woodley and a growing number in Caversham.

REinspired, a registered charity, is also helping get schemes off the ground in Southcote and some Central Reading churches have shown interest while there are potential new REinspired schemes as far as Bromley, Wantage, Headington and Luton.

REinspired co-ordinator Paul Haynes said teachers are happy to offload one of their most tricky subjects to the churches.

He said: “The reason it came about is it is one subject where teachers will go, ‘Oh no RE’. It’s not a priority in the same way that maths, languages, English and science is. A lot of teachers struggle to teach RE so when we come along and say, ‘We can come and teach the Christianity element’, they say, ‘Yes please’.

A small number of workers are backed up by scores of volunteers – ‘people from the pews going into the schools’ as Mr Haynes puts it. They work mostly in primary schools, although Maiden Erleigh is a big supporter of REinspired.

Mr Haynes who works out of St Nicolas Church in Earley, said a fine line is trodden to ensure REinspired is about showing children what happens in church rather than promoting a message. He said: “Because we respect the agenda, people do have the right to withdraw from it and we have one or two who do not want to take part. But we invite parents to sit in on our lessons.

“As long as we are not giving the impression they are taking part in worship, there is no problem. It’s all designed around the needs teachers have. We go in and fill in parts of the curriculum.”

But he said another essential element was that wherever a scheme is set up it has to be run by people from churches local to the schools. He said: “We only work in the local area. When Linda Galpin goes to Waitrose or walks out of her home, she is in that community.”

Sometimes pupils have persuaded their parents to take them to church services after attending REinspired and on occasions bereaved children have opened their hearts to their classmates.

Mrs Galpin said: “They are able to talk about death and they are able to share it with their peers. They are not normally able to do that in schools.” Mr Haynes admits the church may benefit from helping raise its profile among the young.

He said: “I can’t deny we would like that to happen but, hand on heart, we don’t let that influence what we say or the way we say it. We don’t think of it in terms of conversion but it’s about a time in the future when someone is in a time of crisis. The church is somewhere they can go and find the door open and get support.”

If a volunteer ever crosses the line, he said REinspired has been quick to learn. Moralising, he argues, is not what it is about. “I would say there was more moralising in a citizenship class than we would teach,” he said.